In time-critical processing environments, it is important to add predictability to the error compensation process. This is especially important in situations where the processing time may affect the safety of people and/or equipment, such as applications involving vehicular displays and controls. For example, in applications involving the update and display of information on an aircraft, it is crucial that errors that affect the accuracy and integrity of the display are compensated for quickly and predictably.
One approach to this challenge is to provide frequent feedback between logic layers of the processing environment. For example, a graphics display application may frequently interact with a graphics display driver, which may in turn frequently interact with a graphics subsystem. Each or most interactions of the graphics application with the graphics driver may involve the return of error and/or status information to the graphics application. If an error occurs in the graphics subsystem or graphics driver, the graphics application quickly gains notice of this situation and may adjust its behavior, or the behavior of the system it controls, accordingly. A problem with this approach is that returning error and status information for each or most interactions between logical layers of a processing system may degrade performance.